Jon Christensen, a historian at UCLA, wants us to abandon the legacy of John Muir. “‘Muir’s a dead end,’ he said. ‘It’s time to bury his legacy and move on’.” Or maybe Christensen wants some press. Which is a more parsimonious explanation?

In my opinion, a lot of ecology is a mess right now because we lack a clear vocabulary to discuss how processes vary with spatial scale. What does it mean that a phenomenon or a process is “scale-dependent?” You’ll get a different answer depending on who you ask as well as the context. Brody Sandel writes in Ecography in an attempt to clean this mess up, seeking a “taxonomy of spatial scale-depenence.”

“University sued after firing creationist fossil hunter.” Excerpt: “In recent years, a schoolteacher, academic and NASA employee who were creationists have claimed that they were fired unjustly for their religious beliefs. (None were reinstated.) But what makes this case different is that Armitage managed to survive for years in a mainstream academic institution and to publish research in a respected peer-reviewed journal.”

Meanwhile, let’s consider the notion that Wilson floated that invoked the ire of Wilkins. Wilson called Richard Dawkins a “journalist.” Should be we thinking of Dawkins as scientist or a journalist? When I’m asked to assess someone’s science credentials, one of the first places I’ll go are their lab website and google scholar pages. Let’s go look at Dawkins’ page on Google Scholar. Oh, wait, he hasn’t created one. Let’s look at his lab page. Oh, he doesn’t have one that I can tell. I can just find a website for the Richard Dawkins Foundation. But here’s the result of a search for Richard Dawkins in google scholar. You can decide for yourself whether or not he’s more of a journalist than a scientist. Is Dawkins narcissistic? That’s an easier question to answer.

A wikipedia page that lists the titles of deleted Wikipedia articles with “freaky” titles. Including: “Bring your Pez dispenser to work day,” “Chesterfield Snapdragon McFisticuffs,” “CNBC anchors who have never held even a moderately high position in the financial field,” and “Debated questions regarding the procreation and existence of certain Narnian creatures.” However, the majority appear to have been written by prepubescent boys.

If you use p=0.05 to suggest that you have made a discovery, you will be wrong at least 30% of the time. If, as is often the case, experiments are underpowered, you will be wrong most of the time. This conclusion is demonstrated from several points of view. First, tree diagrams which show the close analogy with the screening test problem. Similar conclusions are drawn by repeated simulations of t-tests. These mimic what is done in real life, which makes the results more persuasive. The simulation method is used also to evaluate the extent to which effect sizes are over-estimated, especially in underpowered experiments. A script is supplied to allow the reader to do simulations themselves, with numbers appropriate for their own work. It is concluded that if you wish to keep your false discovery rate below 5%, you need to use a three-sigma rule, or to insist on p≤0.001. And never use the word ‘significant’.

But a funny thing has happened since the rise of professionalism. The tenets it embraced—that some people are more qualified than others, that training and apprenticeship have value, that not everyone can or should (or needs to) gain admission into the club—have become unfashionable. And that is because haterade is not exclusive to the media world. It’s not merely an occupational hazard of being a bigmouth. It affects just about anyone who tries to do anything that is subject to public (which is to say online) discussion. It affects the business owner who’s at the mercy of random, nameless Yelp reviewers who might well be his competitors in disguise. It affects the physician for whom the few patients who post reviews on medical-ratings sites are inevitably the disgruntled ones. It affects the educator who can’t give a poor grade without risking retribution via the websites Rate My Teachers or Rate My Professors. It takes the very essence of what it means to be a professional—training, experience, sheer chops—and reduces it to a stage act to be evaluated with an applause-o-meter.

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2 thoughts on “Recommended reads #40”

On a train journey a couple of years ago I overheard a group of what sounded like social science or humanities students discussing Richard Dawkins. One of them confidently stated that “Dawkins is well respected as a scientist by other biologists”. I had to interject and say that this was not the case, and explained why. They were very surprised, and I suspect that most of the British public would likewise not be aware that Dawkins has not published any original, peer-reviewed science for many years, was not entered into the national Research Assessment Exercise by the University of Oxford, and has rather a low rate of citation given his age and profile.

Re: the Wilson interview, meh. Yeah, Wilkins’ tone is over the top. But you don’t have to be a big Richard Dawkins fan (and I’m not, The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype aside) to see that interview as Wilson just being a famous guy and indulging in sniping at other famous guys. Wilson’s attempt to declare victory and go home on kin selection was pretty laughable.

Thanks for the link to the Sandel paper, on a quick skim it looks very good. I particularly like the pushback against the badly mistaken idea that biotic interactions only matter at small scales. But I would say that. 🙂